What I’m going to do is a headline summary for each of the policy areas (italicised
to keep the boundaries clear) and then look at whether they’re good, bad, or
missing essential points. Please check the manifesto itself for further details.

Title Page

Nothing About You, Without You: A Manifesto
With And For Disabled People.

It’s snappy, and
clever, but I did feel this was slightly appropriating our “Nothing for us,
Without Us” for party political purposes. On the other hand, I thoroughly
approve of manifestos being written “with and for” us.

ForewordSummarises what the last seven years have
been like for disabled people. The UN criticism. Promises to incorporate the UN
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities into UK law. Commits
Labour to ‘a social model of disability’ and promises to keep working with
disabled people. It is signed by Jeremy Corbyn, Debbie Abrahams (Shadow Minister
for Work and Pensions), and Marie Rimmer (Shadow Minister for Disabled People).

Positives are the promises to work with us, which we’ve seen continually
eroded under the Tories, and to incorporate UNCRPD into UK law. Technically
we’re already subject to it as a signatory and as the ECHR uses it as a guiding
principle in applying human rights law, but incorporating it into UK law will
make it more readily accessible to ordinary disabled people. No real negatives,
but I would have been more reassured if Marie Rimmer had known what
the Social Model is two months ago, and if they had said ‘the Social Model’
rather than ‘a social model’. What they are committing themselves to may not be
what disabled people imagine when we hear ‘Social Model’. Equally the seven
months to put Rimmer in place after Abrahams was promoted is deeply worrying as
to how much of a priority disability is to Corbyn.

IntroductionMore introductory background on Tory
cuts. Background on the Disability Equality Roadshows they held, another
commitment to ‘a social model of disability’, promises to replace the WCA and
reverse the changes to PIP that are denying it from 160,000 disabled people,
sanctions to be axed, 30% WRAG cut to be reversed. Disability issues to be
incorporated into every government department. UNCRPD to be law. Social
Security Bill to repeal cuts within first year in office. Social Security
system to stop demonising disabled people.

This is the good stuff: WCA gone, sanctions gone, WRAG cut gone, PIP to revert
to more like DLA, all within the first year in office. A description of their
‘a social model’ says “People may have a condition or an impairment but are
disabled by society. We need to remove the barriers in society that restrict
opportunities and choices for disabled people.“ Which is reassuring, but I’d
still prefer ‘the Social Model’ to be sure we’re on the same page and not
dealing with another Atos/Tory BioPsychoSocialModel. The deliberate disablism
and demonisation of disabled people within DWP is recognised and will be
stopped. Along with sanctions going, we’re promised that the way JCP staff are performance
managed will be changed, hopefully meaning they are no longer judged on the number
of disabled people they’ve managed to victimise this week.

We could have done without the statement that “Work should always pay more than
social security”. If someone is disabled and unable to work, why should they
automatically earn less than their non-disabled peers? Especially when disability comes with higher costs. That
statement seems to be there more for the Daily Mail than for disabled people. It
is at least paired with an acknowledgement that needing to rely on social
security should not leave disabled people feeling ‘worthless and abandoned’.

Somewhat confusing is page 7 referring to 160,000 people being denied PIP, while page
9 references Coalition Government figures, saying 600,000 fewer people will
receive PIP in 2018 than received DLA. That second figure needs to be updated
with a current projection, and using two different but related figures is a
mistake

If you know the
background to Labour’s multi-year search for a disability policy, then the
absence of any mention of Sir Bert Massie and the team
of prominent disabled people who
wrote a set of disability policies for Labour, at Labour’s request, back in
2014, only to have their report dropped at the last moment and replaced a whole
new set of Disability Roadshows, is a wee bit obvious.

ENSURING AN ADEQUATE STANDARD OF LIVING AND
SOCIAL PROTECTION

Cuts to be repealed by Social Security Bill in
year one, Bedroom Tax included. Sanctions to go. PIP and WCA assessments to be
replaced by “a personalised, holistic assessment process which
provides each individual with a tailored plan, building on their strengths and
addressing barriers, whether financial, skills, health, care, transport, or
housing related.” Assessment to be via local voluntary/public sector
organisations. Culture changes in JCP.
This is the headline stuff. It covers the axing of not just WCA, but the ESA
WRAG cut, the PIP changes, and the Bedroom Tax as well. Make no mistake, these
are hugely significant changes. However, there’s significantly too much space
spent attacking the Tories and SNP, which just doesn’t tell us anything about
how Labour will fix stuff and makes us, as disabled people, look like a stick
being used to beat Labour’s political opponents with.

I do have some concerns
over the proposed new assessment regime. It almost has to be better than WCA,
but the proposed system seems to suggest a single assessment for PIP and ESA.
There are some reasons why that might be a good thing, i.e. fewer assessments,
and some reasons it might be not be, i.e. ESA being work related where PIP
isn’t. There does need to be a different focus between the two. Equally people
tend not to apply for the two benefits at the same time.

The proposal to shift
assessment over to public/voluntary bodies is equally mixed, taking the profit
motive out of rejecting us is an undoubted plus, but one core problem with WCA
has been unqualified staff who didn’t know what particular disabilities were,
or had a cliched view of them. Sourcing qualified assessors with positive
attitudes to disability will be a major issue.

Cultural changes at
JCP are also desperately needed, but this may be akin to Hercules cleaning the
Augean stables. There must ultimately be a willingness to sack staff who are
irredeemably disablist.

WORK AND EMPLOYMENT

Disability Employment Gap to be halved. JCP to
work with local employers on recruitment practises. Any employer with 250+
staff to report annually on disabled staff employed. Review to explore
expanding Access to Work. Review of ‘specialist employment services’ and look
at support for disabled people transitioning into work and who may need
sheltered employment.

This is an area I am active in, and there is a lot of good sense here on
halving the 31% / 3 million disabled people Disability Employment Gap. However, it falls
short of where I’d prefer in talking about the significant barrier of
employer/recruiter discrimination. It does actually mention that disabled
people say they encounter this, but that is subtly different from saying that
Labour agrees it exists. That’s still a major step forward on the Tories’
Disability Confident, which insists the only problem with employers is that
they are ‘embarrassed’.

Demanding staff
demographics from every company with 250+ employees is a start, but given 1 in
5 of us is disabled within the definition of the Equality Act, that number
should be far lower. I’d like to see it reduced to 50 at most, and I think
there is an argument for 20. Intersectionality means this reporting will be
meaningless without similar reporting for all minorities. Nor are staff demographics
alone sufficient, the data also needs to cover wage and seniority levels to
determine whether disabled staff are being systematically disadvantaged.

Expanding AtW is
clearly needed, Tory ideological cuts (it made a profit, only the Tories would
cut a benefit that made a profit) mean it is barely helping as many disabled
people as it was seven years ago and for some disability communities, notably
the d/Deaf, it is far worse than it was. Expanding AtW coverage for
self-employed disabled people is also mentioned, but without any details. And
calling for a review simply pushes any change into the future.

With respect to
‘specialist employment services’, it isn’t entirely clear who is being
addressed. The Tories shut down the Remploy factories, and privatised the disability
employment advice part of Remploy, which is now owned by Maximus, the Atos
replacement on the WCA. There are also various charities who offer support for
disabled people JCP don’t feel able to handle (I found them singularly useless,
but they do help some people), and of course there are JCP’s infamous DEAs
(such as the one who told me to apply for minimum wage jobs, even though I was
a specialist aerospace engineer). There’s a case for tossing the lot of them
and starting again with a professional service of specialist disability-trained
employment advisors, but pushing it out into the long grass with another review
isn’t going to fix it in the short term.

Turning to sheltered employment,
the Remploy model was clearly flawed, with able-bodied management more
interested in feathering their own nests, and a government not interested in
ensuring their factories had the capital investment to compete. And in the end
Remploy’s reputation was so bad it was damaging to disabled people as a whole.
But it’s also clear that the shut-down left unsupported a cohort of disabled
people who are unable to compete in the mainstream jobs market, and that there
likely is a role for some form of sheltered workshop scheme that can offer work
to people who won’t be able to find mainstream work. That work needs to be
meaningful, not a patronizing token, and it also needs to be subsidized in such
a way that it isn’t trying and failing to compete with mainstream companies as
Remploy did. There’s no detail here on how Labour would address this, but at
least they’re recognising the problem exists.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Discrimination in accessing education to be
addressed, including with Free Schools and Academies. Education, Health and
Care Plans (EHCs) to be replaced, to prevent them being used to block access to
support. Resourcing to be addressed. Inclusivity strategy for children with
Special Educational Needs and Development (SEND), SEND to be embedded more
fundamentally into teacher training, and training of support stafff. Ensure
Modern Apprenticeship scheme is open to all, more disabled trainees. Higher
Education to be under a duty to support disabled students, tuition fees to go.

There have been issues with academies being
unwilling to take on disabled kids, and the national statistics seem to show
systematic discrimination against disabled kids by the Tories’ favoured grammar
schools, so addressing discrimination in school entry is a necessary step, but
there are no details as to how this is to be achieved.

The new EHCs (replacements for the old
Statements) were rushed in by the Tories, and some councils appear to have been
using them to try to slash the number of kids getting needed support, but
rushing in a replacement risks the same thing happening, so this needs to be
done carefully. (And maybe Labour could take the time to revise the terminology
– there’s nothing ‘special’ about disabled kids' educational needs).

Deeply embedding disability into teacher and
other staff training is a good idea, an essential idea – doubly so as a survey
found 90% of heads felt current training was inadequate. If we train teachers
to have positive views of disability, then they should pass that on to the
pupils they teach. Equally essential is adequate funding to support disabled
pupils, 80% of schools said theirs was inadequate.

Modern Apprenticeships are known to have a problem with numbers of disabled people
entering them, at times as low as 0.3% in some areas, so attention is timely,
but again no details.

For Higher Education, particularly universities, the axing of tuition fees is
clearly a major step towards opening up access. But when you say that cutting
Disabled Student’s Allowance and making universities responsible for support
instead has been a problem, proposing to fix it by making universities
responsible for support seems a bit counter-intuitive. Universities already
have a legal duty under the Equality Act to support their students, if they
aren’t meeting that then a new legal duty to define their support isn’t going
to help unless it is backed with both teeth and resourcing.

ACCESSIBLE ENVIRONMENTS

Environments to allow disabled people to live independently within the
community. More accessible new homes. No expansion of driver only trains.
Restored funding for station accessibility.

The devil is in the details. This talks about
Labour pledging to build 100,000 more homes, and to build more accessible
homes, but nowhere does it say how many of the 100,000 will be accessible. If
you can pledge a figure for overall numbers, you can pledge a figure for
accessible numbers. I’m not impressed by that omission, it suggests something
that’s been thrown together without buy-in from the general policy makers.

Equally the pledge on driver-only trains is
only to prevent expansion of the scheme, not to roll it back on the lines where
it has already been implemented. As a wheelchair-using train passenger, I have
to rely on the guard getting the ramp out on about 50% of my journeys, and
that’s with pre-booked passenger assistance from platform staff. I’ve had to physically
block the door from closing with my leg to prevent a late-night driver-only
service hijacking me to Milton Keynes when I was trying to get home to Kent. If
single crew operation is going to restrict disabled passengers travelling, then
it clearly falls under the Equality Act and needs to be addressed. In fact, an
unpublished report commissioned by the Train Operating Companies in 2015 admits
that this falls under the Equality Act and is likely to be considered
discriminatory. Either roll it back completely, or allow it, the proposal here
doesn’t make sense.

Restoring funding to the Access For All
scheme to make railway stations accessible is clearly essential, I can only access
the platform at my local station by rolling down a dangerously steep access
road after buying my ticket at a booking hall with no disabled parking, and
other stations are worse. But when Access to All was cut in 2014, only 452 out
of 2533 UK stations were accessible, despite almost £400m having been spent
since 2006. Restoring the funding would only increase it from £25m/yr to
£43m/yr. And that doesn’t address the two smaller schemes (‘mid-tier’ and ‘small’)
which were axed at the same time, and which amounted to another £40m. Restoring
Access to All funding only addresses part of the issue and we need an overall
scheme to ensure access, and assistance, at all stations at all hours they are
in operation.

HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE

Create a network of local ‘independent living hubs’ to access services. Invest
extra £37Bn in NHS. Invest £8Bn in care, lay the foundation for a ‘National
Care Service’. Increase status and career opportunities of care workers. Homes
excluded from care means testing. Increase Carer’s Allowance to £73/wk.

A whole 50% of the text here is devoted to attacking the Tories and the
SNP, and not telling us about the details of policies. Undoubtedly adequately
funding the NHS is huge, and essential, but some of the other ideas are just
not clearly explained. The proposal is that these ‘independent living hubs’ would be run by
disabled people and support access to other services, but how this would be
superior to addressing existing access issues to these services isn’t clear. It’s
also impossible to tell
whether the extra £8Bn on care is all targeted at the elderly, rather than at disabled people.

I’m all for increasing the status and career opportunities of domiciliary care
workers (i.e. those who work in the home), many disabled people depend on their
care workers, but there are absolutely no details, nor anything to indicate that
Labour recognises the difference between agency and directly employed staff.
Most disabled people who directly employ care staff don’t have the means to
provide pay increases and fund training courses, so these will need to come from
national or local government.

And saying something must be done about the perception of care work as low paid,
while promising to increase Carer’s Allowance for ‘Britain’s Unsung Heroes’ to
a whole £73 a week seems almost like spitting in carers’ faces. Carer’s
Allowance requires you to be devoting 35 hours or more to caring for someone,
so that’s a princely £2.08/hr being promised (at a maximum), versus a national
living wage of £7.50/hr.

A complete omission is any mention of the Independent Living Fund. It looks
like Labour has no interest in reversing that particular Tory cut, no matter
how hard disability groups fought to prevent it.

Access to Justice

Labour to ensure disabled people have same access to justice as
non-disabled people. National action plans on disability hate crime, and hate
crime against disabled women, with associated reporting of statistics.

This whole section is murky and unclear. Half the text is spent describing Conservative
cuts to legal aid, plans to do away with face to face tribunals and tribunal
fees, but then all it says in terms of addressing them is: Labour will ensure disabled people have the same access to justice as
non-disabled people. There’s no promise to actually restore legal aid or
axe tribunal fees. There is a promise to strengthen the disability provisions
of the Equality Act, by both reinstating the Public Sector Equality Duty and ‘seeking’
to extend it to the private sector. I think most disabled people would far
prefer to see government take up the burden of enforcing the Equality Act and
not leave it to individual disabled people to sue when organisations discriminate
or otherwise refuse to act on their obligations. There is a promise to increase
the independence and role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but still only to support
disabled people in taking action.

There is a promise, in accordance with the
Istanbul Convention, to introduce “annual reporting of the levels of disability
hate crimes and violence against disabled women”. The proposal for releasing
stats on violence against disabled women is completely appropriate, intersectional
violence against women is a particular problem. But we already have multiple national
reports on the levels of disability hate crime, and general disability hate
crime is not subject to the Istanbul Convention, which addresses only violence
against women. This is utterly confused. On the other hand, the promise of a national
disability hate crime action plan is a needed one. The last Home Office hate
crime action plan essentially forgot about disability hate crime, which got one
sentence in the entire document, and that clearly added at the last minute. Extra training is promised for the police, but a considerable percentage of the problems with disability hate crime prosecutions actually arise with the judiciary, rather than the police or CPS, with judges refusing to implement the hate crime uplifts and instead sidetracking cases into the lesser sentences for crimes again 'vulnerable people'.

A gaping absence is any promise to raise
disability hate crime to the same status as race and religious hate crime, an
acknowledged weakness in the law that disability groups (and LGBT groups who
face the same issues) have been demanding parties should address in their
manifestos.

PARTICIPATING FULLY IN POLITICAL, PUBLIC
AND CULTURAL LIFE

As a party Labour will have accessible selection processes at all
levels. Labour will review access to sports, art and leisure venues.

The party stuff only commits Labour to meeting
its legal commitments under the Equality Act, I’m really not sure ‘we’ll
provide reasonable adjustments’ should be in their political manifesto when it’s
the law of the land! Completely missing is any promise to reinstate the Access
to Elected Office Fund, which existed to help all disabled candidates with
their additional campaigning costs. Why on earth is Labour proposing to address
this internally, but not to reinstate it at a national level?

The promised review on access to sport, art
and leisure venues, illustrated with the failure of the Premier League clubs to
meet access requirements, seems strange when you realise that the EHRC is
already on the verge of launching a formal investigation of the Premier League
given its failure to carry through on previous access pledges. Why promise to
make the EHRC fully independent in one section, and then undercut it in the
next? The logical approach here would have been to ask the EHRC to extend its
investigation.

A promise is also made to promote the use of BSL and to give it legal status,
something the British Deaf Association has been campaigning on for over 30
years.

And that's the last item in the manifesto.

Accessibility

Points deducted for the initial release, the
only link to the document that I and other activists I know could initially find was buried
under one of those interminably long auto-generated document names, from a link
on the DisabilityLabour site. That just looked amateur when you linked
directly to it; but a better link does now exist on Labour’s main site.

And serious points deductions for failure to
provide accessible formats. These exist for the main manifesto, but if they exist
for the disability manifesto then they have been well hidden. Seriously, Labour
must have known they would be criticised for this. Producing a manifesto
specifically for disabled people, but without accessible formats, is pretty
much unforgivable.
Conclusions

The absolutely vital stuff, axing WCA and
rolling back the cuts, is all there (well, except for the ILF), but on the
merely very important things start to look a bit less uniformly good, and there
are a few absolutely unforgivable omissions, noticeably the failure to
reinstate the ILF and not raising disability (and LGBT) hate crime to the same
status as race and religious hate crime.

Of course it’s far better than
what we would face from a Tory government.

Undoubtedly this is a step forward, and some of it is really good; but Labour
need to win on Thursday for any of this to be put into force. And, of course, manifesto
promises can be fleeting things that never again see the light of day. We’ll
see.

* However there is an Easy Read review of the disability related policies
within the party manifestos here and which also looks at accessible versions:

Thursday, 16 February 2017

The submission phase
of the DWP consultation on the Work and Health Green Paper closes tomorrow, 17th
February at 11:45pm (!?!). Submissions can still be made at https://consultations.dh.gov.uk/workandhealth/consult/
via an online form. That only the online form is available for submission is probably
a hint as to just how attention the Green Paper shows to the actual needs of
disabled people.

The Spartacus Network has just released a comprehensive (237 page) response
to the Work and Health Green Paper with clinically dissects it to reveal it for
what it is, a smokescreen. I’m listed as a co-author to the report, because it
incorporates my ‘Ticked Off’ analysis of the critical weaknesses of the
Disability Confident scheme that was originally published here on Where’s the Benefit?, but that’s a tiny fraction of the full report and the real credit
goes to Caroline Richardson and Stef Benstead as the two principle authors.

The Spartacus report brands the Green Paper a smokescreen because it is
supposed to address the government’s pledge to halve the Disability Employment
Gap, which sees disabled employment running at nearly half the rate of
non-disabled employment. As any disabled person can tell you, the gap exists
because of society’s attitude towards disabled people in general, and because
of blatant disability discrimination in recruitment and the workplace in
particular. But this is a Tory government and god forbid an employer might ever
do anything wrong. So if the problem can’t be with the employers or society,
then obviously the problem must be with us.

In order to erect that
smokescreen the Green Paper spends a great deal of time implying disability isn’t
actually that much of a barrier to work and proposes to step up a gear in
trying to compel disabled people to find a job. Beyond the already announced
30% cut in ESA, because clearly it’ll be easier to find a job if you can’t heat
your house or feed yourself, Work and Health proposes forcing people in the ESA
Support Group, even those who are terminally ill, to undertake at least some work-related
activity. Bizarrely it aims to reduce the funding available to the Work Programme
subcontractors on a per person basis, while proposing that unqualified ‘work coaches’ be
able to overrule GPs on patient’s health and treatment, and insisting that GPs
should recognise that good health can only be achieved through work. One
wonders how they explain the country’s 16 million pensioners?

When it comes to
addressing the reality that the problem lies with employers, and society, the
green paper mentions the word discrimination
precisely twice, and one of those references is in relation to a
non-governmental scheme. How can you seriously discuss halving the Disability
Employment Gap and not address the universally recognised problem of widespread
discrimination?

To quote a senior recruitment industry professional of many years’ experience on
my career prospects as a highly skilled engineer: “You need to understand that with your disability no
private sector company will consider employing you, and precious few public
sector employers either”. If even the recruitment industry admits they have a
problem with disability discrimination, why won’t ministers?

The consultation might equally be branded a smokescreen, as even before the
submission phase has closed DWP have announced that London and Manchester will
be acting as DWP’s proxies to implement the Green Paper’s plans, which shows a
real readiness to listen when disabled people tell them why those plans won’t
work. The Mayor of London has welcomed the opportunity to get involved, but he
probably hasn’t realised that DWP are likely hoping to spread the blame when Work
and Health crashes and burns. And, of course, that 30% cut to ESA is bearing
down on us like a ton of uncaring Tory bricks.